Brooklyn Book Festival Gets Rock and Roll

The city’s intelligentsia is gearing up for the 2008 Brooklyn Book Festival this Sunday, at which some 150 authors—ranging from Joan Didion and Jimmy Breslin to the Jonathans Lethem and Franzen—will be in attendance. But we’d be lying if we said that we weren’t the most excited for the chat that’s supposed to go down between icons of cool Ian MacKaye (founder of the legendary punk rock label Dischord Records and former member of the rock-snob approved hardcore bands Minor Threat and Fugazi) and Thurston Moore (shaggy-haired eternally boyish looking guitarist for Sonic Youth).

Mr. MacKaye and Mr. Moore are scheduled for a conversation/Q&A starting at 3 p.m. to "discuss the parallel worlds of independent music and book publishing," according to the festival’s Web site. How, you ask, did it come to be that these two super hip indie rockers will be rubbing elbows with some of the literary greats of our time? Well, one of the festival’s organizers is Johnny Temple, who is also the chair of the Brooklyn Borough President’s Literary Council and the head of the independent publishing house Akashic Books, and who also also happens to be the bass player of the seminal ‘90s indie rock band Girls Against Boys. Now it all makes sense!

So basically, back in high school our English teachers probably thought we were weird for being so into the all these strange bands with silly names instead of like, Dave Matthews, or whatever all the normal kids were listening to. But thanks to the Brooklyn Book Festival, we can proudly say that the joke’s on them!